Webloggin » Attention All Bloggers, Put Down that Internet Explorer

Tech Tips is a new feature on Webloggin. I wanted to share some of the experiences and insights I have had working with technology as a software engineer and technical consultant at some of the worlds largest companies. The tech articles I post on Webloggin will be targeted toward the end user and blog authors in an effort to make the Internet experience as fun and easy as possible.

You can download the software discussed in this article by clicking on the following image -

Anyone who spends a substantial amount of time on the Internet usually has a list of favorite sites that they visit on a regular basis. This is especially true of bloggers who blog on topics that change on a regular basis. I liken the Internet to print radio in its ability to be real time. This likely means that you, the blog author, spend an appreciable amount of time visiting site after site in preparation for your up and coming article.

If you are a user of Internet Explorer you no doubt end up with a morass of windows that clutter your desktop within minutes of starting your search. Cutting and Pasting between various browser windows and Word or textpad can take forever as you desperately search for the next window you seek for content.

Tabbed Browsers

Firefox came a long way toward eliminating that frustration with the introduction of tabbed browsers. It is quite simple really, find a link you like, right click on the link and select “Open Link in New Tab”.

You can also open a new blank tabbed window with the “ctrl+t” hot key combination. Navigate to that window and bring up any site you desire without affecting any of the other tabbed sites you have opened elsewhere.

Swapping between these tabbed windows is as quick as a “ctrl+tab” hotkey combo or a simple click of your mouse.

Suddenly your much cramped Internet Explorer world is neatly managed into one tidy Firefox window. Right click on any tab to get a context menu that will show you all the various command options available from that tab.

Firefox Tabbed Browser

This feature is so cool that Microsoft is copying it for their redesign in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

Live Bookmarks

Now that you have mastered the art of tabbed browsing you will want to find out about live bookmarks. This is one the most important time saving innovations that has been introduced into the browser technology.

Everybody who blogs should be aware that their posts are syndicated throughout the Internet via RSS feeds. RSS is the backbone of the blogosphere. It allows for all sorts of cool things like trackback pings and pingback comments, blogroll updates, technoratti feeds, personal bloglines, diggs, etc.

Live book marks take advantage of a web site’s RSS feed by capturing the headlines of the most recently posted articles, site description and feed location as a bookmark tag for quick viewing and navigation. Any RSS feed can be saved on your bookmarks toolbar folder as a permanent sink for incoming feeds. See the figures below for an example.

You no longer have to navigate to a site to find the most recent topic they are talking about. Simply click on the live book as indicated by the small RSS icon on your bookmark toolbar and you have a listing of the last 15 or more articles that were published as indicated by that site’s RSS feed. Click on any headline to open that article up in you Firefox browser; right mouse click and you can open it in a new tab or window. There is even an option to open all 15 posts in one tabbed browser at once with one click!

Firefox Live Bookmark

RSS feeds aren’t simply a feature exclusive to blogs. Web sites like yahoo news and the New York Times provide one or more feeds for their internet sites.

Adding the live bookmark to your toolbar is simple. Firefox automatically detects if the web site has any associated feeds and will place an RSS icon in the address bar at the top of your browser when it finds them. All you have to do is click on that RSS icon with your mouse (left mouse button) and a dialog will come up asking if you want to add this live bookmark to your bookmark folder toolbar.

Address Bar with RSS Icon

I take this one step further and add folders to the tool bar and place the live bookmarks into neatly organized folders; all of which are accessible by a simple mouse click.

Sites like Yahoo news take advantage of this concept by providing RSS feeds on individual topics such as mideast conflict. Hence it is easy to add a live bookmark for all of the Yahoo news Middle East conflict releases.

This is another feature that Microsoft is copying for their redesign in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

There is so much more to Firefox; I have only scratched the surface. If you have a wide screen monitor that supports resolutions such to 1920×1200 you will be amazed at the difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer. The latter scales the fonts and graphics up in size on those resolutions and the result is choppy out of focus images. Yuck. Firefox provides support for transparent png image files as well.

One important note, you still need Internet Explorer as a cross reference because IE 6 is a bit different than Firefox in its compliance with CSS styles. This is important for web designers and bloggers who like to mess around with their style sheet. Always check the look and feel of your blog with both browsers! You shouldn’t be surprised if your most recent change looks great in one browser and not the other.

Microsoft has taken a beating from Firefox for some time now and they hope to rectify this in their next release. For me time is money and Firefox has been a timesaver for quite some time now. Give it a try and you might not ever go back.